Category Archives: Media

On the campaign trail President Obama attempted to transfer his base of support to Hillary Clinton. He pleaded,”I’m not on the ballot but my policies are.” And he warned that he’d take it as a “personal insult” if African Americans failed to turn out for her. Well, Obama Nation didn’t show and Hillary lost. Trump was elected president with majorities in the House and Senate.

In a Rolling Stone interview the president analyzed the shellacking. And he concluded his lost legacy was due to a failure to communicate with middle America. That would be the Coal miners he and Hillary promised to put out of work. The Bitter Clingers. The Deplorables.

Fox News

That and Fox News. “Part of it Obama said, “is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country.” Personally, I hardly noticed Fox in bars and restaurants in my midwest chunk of the country. But maybe that’s just me.

Others, however, are embarrassed because people are laughing at us. Many of whom live under the undemocratic rule of progressive experts. The European Union for example. The EU features strangling regulation, low growth, high unemployment, and negative interest rates.

The Brits had enough of that and voted to exit the E.U. – Brexit. Those voters too were laughed at by their enlightened betters who were embarrassed for their country.

To make his point he held up the front page from that morning’s edition. The headline read Democrats, Students, Foreign Allies Face Reality Of Trump Presidency:

“Their headline is not ‘Disaffected Americans Have A Champion Going To The White House’ or ‘The Country Votes For Fundamental Change.’ The headline is about how disappointed the friends of the people who run The New York Times are about what happened,” Halperin said.

“It’s amazing.” “It’s The Onion.”

Media Bias

Back in August NYT media columnist Jim Rutenberg sort of defended media bias saying, “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.”

So, they seem to know what they’re doing.

For example, here’s a column by Will Rahn at CBS News titled The Unbearable Smugness of the Press.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch was caught red handed discussing grandkids with Bill Clinton. Bill’s wife, Hillary, was under investigation at the time for her secret email server. So the AG turned over her decision making authority in the caper to FBI Director James Comey.

Jane Mayer, in the New Yorker, points out that FBI Director Comey broke with Justice Department tradition:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise.

Tarmac Talk

He might have felt compelled to do otherwise because the AG turned her authority in the case over to him:

Comey’s supporters argue that he had to act independently, and publicly, because Lynch had compromised herself by having an impromptu visit with Bill Clinton late in the investigation.”

In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. Comey, therefore, gave Mrs. Clinton a twofer: an unheard-of public proclamation that she should not be indicted by the head of the investigative agency; and a means of taking Lynch off the hook, which allowed the decision against prosecution to be portrayed as a careful weighing of evidence rather than a corrupt deal cooked up in the back of a plane parked on a remote tarmac.

Taking Action

McCarthy says not taking action would also have influenced the election:

But of course, not taking action one would take but for the political timing is as political as it gets. To my mind, it is more political because the negatively affected candidate is denied any opportunity to rebut the law-enforcement action publicly.